The Notorious Phantom Strikes Again

It may be time to admit that I’ve been bamboozled.

I first came to the conclusion almost twenty years ago that under its skin Dr. No is essentially a parade of Greek myths, intertwined with a much happier version of W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions.  Bond is alternately cast as Theseus and Perseus, while Honey appears to be an erstwhile jungle goddess whom Bond mistakes for Venus before she is forced to reenact the sacrifice of Andromeda to a sea monster.

Although the imagery is unmistakable (almost suspiciously so), it does fall apart at the end.  The fly in the ointment is the kraken, the giant squid that tries to pry Bond off a sea fence and drag him into the murky depths of an estuary.  Since Bond seems to be playing the role of Perseus, perhaps the squid, with a forest of arms “weaving in front of the eyes like a bunch of thick snakes,” is supposed to represent Medusa.  I offered the suggestion out loud, even though it always felt thin.  If Fleming’s trying to suggest that the squid is a Gorgon, he’s not trying very hard.  Somehow it never occurred to me that the squid appears for another reason entirely, one that crops up in nearly every one of the late books.

I’ve tried to make a case for most of the novels, starting at From Russia With Love, as clever acts of literary adaptation.  FRWL is Fleming’s sinister version of "Sleeping Beauty."  Goldfinger is “Rumpelstiltskin" with the imp recast as a b.s. artist with the power to spin golden fantasies that cloud men’s minds.  Thunderball and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service become two halves of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with The Spy Who Loved Me acting as a hinge.  The series proper concludes with You Only Live Twice in an ingenious retelling of Sir Orfeo, as Dr. Shatterhand’s garden and seaside castle stand in for the fairy Otherworld.

In just about every case there’s a “tell,” a deliberate detail, the literary equivalent of the calling card left at the scene of a heist by a gentleman-thief in detective fiction.  It’s something you might not notice unless you’re looking for it, but once you've seen it, it glows in the dark.

In From Russia With Love there’s the nugget of information about Tatiana’s ballet career, which suggests that she’s not only living out the story of "Sleeping Beauty," but has previously played the part on stage.  There’s that sinister spinning wheel in Goldfinger, the odd mention of “Christmas spirit” in Thunderball, with a plot that depends on Bond’s winning a high-stakes game during the seasonal festivities.  There are a few in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where we find the repeated phrase “mind your head,” and learn that Ruby Windsor hails from Blackpool, north of the Ribble River.

For the past few posts I’ve pointed out (as others have done before) that Fleming may have absorbed the concept of the evil genius with an army of disposable henchmen, from reading Jules Verne novels.  A few days back I was listing some of the playful similarities between Dr. No and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - not Jules Verne’s novel, but the Disney adaptation, noting how the Disney version could almost be the blueprint for a Bond thriller.  Apparently, Fleming thought so too.

Consider this outline of both narratives:  While investigating a series of mysterious occurrences, a team is captured by a mad scientist who wines and dines them, offering them a majestic view of undersea life.  This same scientist has created a vehicle which superstitious folk sometimes mistake for a mythological beast.  At the climax of the story a rugged man of action (who is also a notorious ladies’ man) bursts out of his confinement to battle a giant squid with a knife and a spear.  The madman is killed and his secret lair is destroyed, while the hero escapes.

All of Fleming’s allusions to Greek mythology, Bond in the labyrinth, the overt references to Venus, the imagery of Andromeda at the edge of the sea, may be distractions meant to conceal a borrowed blueprint.  Then the monster at the heart of the labyrinth is finally revealed, and - Surprise!  It's the giant squid from that Disney film.  You’ve been watching the same story all along!

I watched the Disney movie again a few weeks ago and thought, if only Fleming had dropped in one of those unnecessary but apparently mandatory musical numbers Disney liked to include, the two works would match up perfectly.  Wait a minute.  There are unnecessary musical numbers in both.  Ned Land belts out an amusing shanty about his past loves to entertain his shipmates, and Bond sings a phrase from a Caribbean calypso (It’s “Underneath the Mango Tree” in the film, but “Marianne” in the book) to gently make his presence known to Honey.  A coincidence?*  Probably no more coincidental than the heroes in both works resorting to a knife and a spear to battle a giant squid.

Which is to say, the second instance seems less like happenstance and more like the calling card left at the scene of a heist by a gentleman-thief.  

*What is genuinely coincidental is that just as Dr. No was rolling off the presses in 1958, Sean Connery was being cast in Darby O’Gill, a film in which the actor would sing another of those unnecessary but apparently mandatory Disney ballads.